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Virginia Tech shooting

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Also known as Virginia Tech massacre, VTM

shooting on the campus of Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University in Blacksburg, Virginia, United States

Key facts

Location
37°13′23″N 80°25′16″W / 37.2231°N 80.4211°W / 37.2231; -80.4211 (Ambler Johnston Hall) , 37°13′46″N 80°25′23″W / 37.2294°N 80.4231°W / 37.2294; -80.4231 (Norris Hall) , Blacksburg, Virginia , U.S.
Date
April 16, 2007 ; 19 years ago ( 2007-04-16 ) , c. 7:15 – 9:51 a.m. ( EDT )
Target
Students, staff and faculty at Virginia Tech
Attack type
Mass shooting , school shooting , mass murder , murder–suicide , spree shooting
Weapons
9mm Glock 19 semi-automatic pistol .22 caliber Walther P22 semi-automatic pistol
Deaths
33 (31 at Norris Hall; including the perpetrator)
Injured
23 (17 from gunfire)
Perpetrator
Seung-Hui Cho
Defenders
Liviu Librescu Kevin Granata G. V. Loganathan Jocelyne Couture-Nowak Haiyan Cheng Derek O'Dell Katelyn Carney Henry Lee Zach Petkewicz Matthew La Porte
Motive
Inconclusive

via Wikipedia infobox

~40 min read

Encyclopedic overview

The Virginia Tech shooting was a spree shooting and mass shooting that occurred on Monday, April 16, 2007, comprising two attacks on the campus of the Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University (Virginia Tech) in Blacksburg, Virginia, United States. Seung-Hui Cho, an undergraduate student at the university, killed 32 people and wounded 17 others with two semi-automatic pistols before committing suicide. Six others were injured jumping out of windows to escape Cho.

Cho first fatally shot two people at West Ambler Johnston Hall, a dormitory. Two hours later, he perpetrated a school shooting at Norris Hall, a classroom building, where he chained the main entrance doors shut and fired into four classrooms and a stairwell, killing thirty more people. As police stormed Norris Hall, Cho fatally shot himself in the head. It was the deadliest mass shooting in modern U.S. history and remained so for nine years until the Pulse nightclub shooting. It remains the deadliest school shooting in U.S. history and the deadliest mass shooting in Virginia history.

Excerpted from Wikipedia’s “Virginia Tech shooting” article, available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 licence.

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